


Fortunes of War

by gardnerhill



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes (BBC Radio), Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Community: watsons_woes, Drug Addiction, Gen, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-25
Updated: 2013-07-25
Packaged: 2017-12-21 07:05:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/897304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gardnerhill/pseuds/gardnerhill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are all kinds of wounded veterans.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fortunes of War

**Author's Note:**

> For JWP 2013 Prompt #24: **Picture prompt:** [Man with pipe (self-portrait)](http://www.the-athenaeum.org/art/detail.php?ID=87339)
> 
> Fandom is the BBC Radio Productions of the Sherlock Holmes Canon from the 1980s that featured Clive Merrison & Michael Williams.

“It seems to me,” said Mr. Sherlock Holmes, who sat and looked at a sheaf of papers at my desk whilst I undertook the task of re-organising my files amid my return to Baker Street, “that I am eternally indebted to two men in particular and one in the abstract for our becoming acquainted with one another.”

I looked up from where I sat on the floor, surrounded by manuscripts and proofs and copies of the STRAND strewn higgledy-piggledy all over the carpet before the cabinet in which I regularly kept my own writings separate from the cases containing my books and my medical journals. “Two, you say? And one in the abstract?”

Holmes dismissed my question with a wave of his hand. “I can hardly fault the poor aim of the Ghazi rifleman who failed to kill a British soldier.”

“Oh, well, nor can you!” I retorted. “He came closer than he thought, between the wound and the fever. Perhaps I ought to track him down and inform his chieftain – he might get some kind of reward out of it, if he’s still alive.”

“We needn’t go that far,” Holmes replied in the same jocular vein. He had quite taken to what he called my ‘pawky humour’ – especially now, in the still-tender days of our reunification after three years of absence, loss and tragedy. The pall and pallor from his exile still hung over my friend, and alas I still often suffered from recurring bouts of bitterness at how cruelly he had deceived me. “I find it enough to be grateful that he missed your heart.”

“Of the two you specify I know one right off,” I responded. I did not pretend to continue sorting the box of manuscripts before me; all my attention was on this conversation. “I am doubly grateful to Stamford. He was a pillar of strength to me after Mary died.” _As you were not._

“As I could not be,” Holmes said soberly, and I snorted in unamused laughter at how closely he had followed my thoughts. “I knew, you see, that you have a network of friends and acquaintances in this city that, while small, is a good deal greater than one. Stamford therefore has my double gratitude as well, for coming to your aid in two distinct times.”

_“Well, that’s a strange thing…You’re the second man today who’s used that expression to me!”_

_“Take it up again. Solve a few crimes. … Doctor’s orders. Now all you need is the right case!”_ (And that ‘right case’ had been Ronald Adair’s bizarre death, that had conversely seemed to bring my own self stumbling out of a tomb like Lazarus.)

“And that second man?” I asked. “One of the overworked doctors or nurses in the Peshawar hospital? The pilot of the _Orontes_? The fellow who first spread the enteric fever through my ward and prevented me from recovering and going back to my regiment? They all had a part in the sequence of events that sent me to the Criterion.”

“I speak of the man who unwittingly conspired with your incompetent Ghazi assassin to keep you alive that day,” he said. “Your brave and invaluable orderly, Murray, who carried you to safety during the retreat.”

Murray.

“He died,” Holmes said, looking at my face. “No. No, he succumbed to something else. It would almost be easier if he were dead, for then you would be proud and sorrowful instead of lowering your eyes and head. Some evil influence – drink, or drugs.”

His skill as if with a lancet, touching the exact center of my inner thoughts, was another pain I had nearly forgotten.

“Hashish.” I met his eyes. “Or so my comrades say. I never saw him again, after that day.” I thought of the last way I’d seen him, gasping and red-faced, his _khaki_ uniform stained with blood (much of it  mine), heaving at the foaming horse’s haltar with one hand and aiming his pistol with the other as the terrible cries of our enemies grew nearer. He had been my salvation on that terrible day – and now, according to my contacts still stationed in Afghanistan, an indolent in the alleys of Candahar, smoking his life away in the tattered remnants of his uniform, a shattered veteran.

“Hashish brings peaceful dreams.” Holmes kept my gaze, and there was only the same painful understanding as in mine. “I remember your troubled sleep in those first months. It is the more remarkable thing that you did not succumb to the temptation.”

I shook my head. “All the morphine given me was just enough to take the worst pain away – never enough to bring peace.” I managed a smile. “I found another way to treat the pain.” I held up a handful of my manuscripts. “Ink.”

“A prodigious amount of the substance,” Holmes said wryly, holding his own armful of papers covered with my handwriting.

We laughed together. Thank God, that had not changed from before – we could still make each other laugh at the slightest provocation.

I shook my head, a little more resigned. “Holmes, I wish there were something I could do for Murray. But I could barely help one of Mary’s friends’ husband here in London with his opium addiction, let alone a man halfway around the world.”

“He made his own choices, Watson,” Holmes said. “Perhaps some day, he will choose to free himself. Remarkable breakthroughs are being made these days in the treatment of drug addiction – even for those who are not blessed to share their lives with a stubborn Army doctor. Notify your comrades that they are to let you know if he ever returns – and together we should be able to pay his way out of Afghanistan, and direct him to a London specialist.”

“Do you mean it?” I cried, papers once again forgotten. My thoughts were made lighter at once, a bright thin ray of hope shining into the darkness of this memory. “Would you help me if such an occasion arose?”

“Of course I mean it,” Holmes retorted. “I owe that man exactly as much as you do.”


End file.
